Sweet Potatoes are the Best!

Monday Challenge:

Sweet Potatoes

What’s your favorite food? This is mine :)

I think sweet potatoes are the best. You can eat them for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, for dessert, or even as a snack. They’re great hot or cold.

Sweet potatoes are not just for holiday meals (where they’re often served loaded with sugar and fat). They need no added sugar.

They not only taste good but they’re good for you:

• Sweet potatoes are high in fiber and antioxidants, which protect your body from free radical damage and promote a healthy gut and brain.

• Sweet potatoes are one of the best sources of beta-carotene, which is converted to vitamin A to support good vision and your immune system.

• Sweet potatoes have low glycemic index (lower than regular potatoes) so they won’t spike your blood sugar.

• Sweet potatoes are a great source of potassium, which naturally helps to lower blood pressure by reducing the effects of sodium and tension in the blood vessels. Sprinkle a bit of cinnamon to pump up that BP lowering power.

Sweet potatoes are great to batch cook so you have them available all week long. And they’re budget friendly.

I like to wash them, cut them in half and bake (cut side down) for 20 to 30 minutes. You can eat them cold when you’re on the go. Try reheating them in your air fryer – amazing!

You can also use sweet potatoes to both flavor and thicken your soup or stew.

Your challenge this week is to add sweet potatoes to your menu.

Sweet potatoes are so versatile and can be easily added to your diet. Try them for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, for dessert, or even as a snack. Need recipe ideas? Let me know.

How will you enjoy them this week?

Let me know in the comments below.

Be sure to hit the LIKE button :)

Is Oil Healthy?

Monday Challenge:

Avoid Added Oil

Think olive oil is healthy? Think again.

Most people agree that sugar is bad for you. Sugar is a refined food. But oil is a refined food also – it is a refined fat. And oil has two times the calories as refined sugar!

If vegans cut out all animal products and saturated fats (thus cholesterol) they can still get heart disease. Why? The main source appears to be vegetable oils, olive oil, and coconut oil.

Do you slather oil on everything you cook? Did you know there’s oil in almost every restaurant food?

Oil is bad for many reasons:

• Oil raises LDL cholesterol which is bad for heart health.

• Oil, even olive oil, damages the endothelial lining of our arteries (thereby paving the way for plaque formation).

• Eating foods with added oil can encourage blood coagulation which create thrombosis that leads to heart attacks and strokes.

• Oil in your diet creates intramyocellular lipids (fat inside your muscle cells) that interferes with insulin’s ability to enter cells which leads to diabetes.

• Consumption of too much oil can cause acne on your skin and foods that are fried in oils can worsen the health of your skin .

• At 120 calories per tablespoon, oil calories can add up making it challenging to lose or maintain weight. In fact, oil stimulates appetite and does not satiate.

We do need some fats in our diets - how do you get them? Eat the whole, plant food and not just the extracted fats.

In other words, get your olive oil by tossing a few olives on your salad and make salad dressings with nuts and seeds, not oil. Don't add vegetable oils when cooking – it’s easy to roast, bake, and sauté foods without oil.

So I ask you: Why would you waste calories on something that has no nutrients in it other than fat? And why would anyone believe that highly concentrated fat is healthy?

Your challenge this week is to avoid added oil - eat the whole plant food and not just the extracted fats Learn how to prepare and cook your food without added oils.

How will you avoid refined oil this week?

Let me know in the comments below.

Be sure to hit the LIKE button :)